Big Ten votes to start football season in late October

In a somewhat stunning reversal, the Big Ten conference Wednesday had a unanimous vote from chancellors and presidents to start its football season the weekend of Oct. 23, after first suspending the season on Aug. 11, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

While the Big Ten cited improved medical testing and screening as part of the reason why it reversed its earlier decision, reporting from Sportico notes that both political and economic pressure may have played a role in the decision, which comes even as Covid-19 cases continue to occur nationwide.

The start of other Power 5 conference seasons this past weekend may also have played a role in the Big Ten’s decision, even as those schools had poor compliance by fans to Covid-19 safety protocols for stadium attendance. So far, there have been no reports on whether or not Big Ten schools will allow fans to attend games, but most likely some will have limited-attendance plans to try to recoup some of the lost game-day revenue.

The Pac-12, which suspended its season the day after the Big Ten did, recently signed a deal for improved Covid-19 testing, which in recent reports suggest that at the very least the conference should be able to start basketball season sooner rather than later.

Big Ten postpones fall sports, including football, due to Covid-19 pandemic

The seemingly inevitable became fact Tuesday, when the Big Ten conference announced it was postponing all fall sports, including football, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The mental and physical health and welfare of our student-athletes has been at the center of every decision we have made regarding the ability to proceed forward,” said Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren in the statement posted on the conference website. “As time progressed and after hours of discussion with our Big Ten Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Big Ten Sports Medicine Committee, it became abundantly clear that there was too much uncertainty regarding potential medical risks to allow our student-athletes to compete this fall.”

The next question is whether or not other college conferences and schools will follow suit; rumors had surfaced Monday that the Pac-12 was set to make a similar announcement.

Mountain West, Mid-American conferences postpone fall sports; are Big Ten and Pac-12 next?

The Mountain West conference on Monday postponed all fall sports, including football, joining the Mid-American conference as the first FBS conferences to rule out games this fall due to the coronavirus pandemic. And even as foobtall insiders and some politicians called for college football to be played even in the face of rising numbers of Americans testing positive for the disease, rumors surfaced that two of the biggest conferences, the Big Ten and the Pac-12, were ready to announce their own fall sports postponements soon.

Though other sports, including the NBA and the NHL, have staged successful re-openings in the midst of the pandemic, their expensive “bubble” implementations — where teams are basically sequestered in a locale without need to travel — is simply not possible for college sports, especially college football with its large rosters and the need for teams to travel to play a conference schedule while students also attend school. Major League Baseball, which is in the middle of a shortened 2020 season without a bubble, is in danger of having its season scrapped due to continued outbreaks of the virus among teams.

Big Ten, Pac-12 move to conference-only schedules for fall sports

In what may eventually be just an interim step before outright cancellations, the Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences both announced this week plans to move to conference-only schedules for fall sports, which in immediate news meant that a significant number of non-conference football games are now canceled.

Both the Big Ten statement from Thursday and the Pac-12 statement from Friday contained language that acknowledged that the 2020-21 sports seasons may not take place at all, due to ongoing concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic. The Power-5 conference moves come on the same week as the Division 1 Ivy League announced its outright cancellation of all fall sports.

“As we continue to focus on how to play this season in a safe and responsible way, based on the best advice of medical experts, we are also prepared not to play in order to ensure the health, safety and wellness of our student-athletes should the circumstances so dictate,” said closing line in the Big Ten’s statement.

“The health and safety of our student-athletes and all those connected to Pac-12 sports continues to be our number one priority,” said Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott in the conference’s statement. “Our decisions have and will be guided by science and data, and based upon the trends and indicators over the past days, it has become clear that we need to provide ourselves with maximum flexibility to schedule, and to delay any movement to the next phase of return-to-play activities.”

AT&T: Getting busy with multiple college football DAS deployments

In an interview with AT&T’s John Donovan earlier this year the company’s senior executive vice president told us that AT&T would continue to be aggressive in its deployment of stadium DAS systems. True to his word, here are announcements from no fewer than eight new top U.S. universities (and one that was announced earlier in the year) that got an AT&T DAS in time for this fall’s football season.

Included in the list of DAS deployments that AT&T either is leading or has joined another operator’s infrastructure are Baylor University, which has a whole new stadium and a new stadium Wi-Fi network as well; Big Ten schools Indiana University, Ohio State University, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin (where AT&T also installed a new Wi-Fi network and some IPTV systems); the University of Missouri from the SEC; and Pac-12 schools the University of Washington as well as the University of California, an installation plan that we covered last year. AT&T also participated alongside Verizon in a unique joint DAS deployment at the University of Oregon, also announced earlier this year.

Why so much DAS? As we are finding out in the process of doing a lot of reporting for our upcoming Q4 Stadium Tech Report on college football stadium technology deployments, Wi-Fi deployments are still somewhat of a rarity, even at some of the biggest schools. As we’ve said before, bringing in a DAS deployment makes a lot of sense for schools since A) you can usually get the carrier to pay for most if not all of the cost of building the DAS; and B) a good DAS goes a long way toward eliminating the feared “no signal” problem that can still be found on many major college campus facilities.

How much have fans already been using the new networks? According to AT&T the new Mizzou DAS has done the biggest amount of traffic so far, with 290 gigabytes of traffic crossing the DAS system with its 150+ antennas at one game this season. Cal was close behind with an average of 253 GB per game so far in 2014, while up in Seattle at UDub the fans are generating an average of 190 GB per game. Remember, these stats represent ONLY AT&T traffic on the AT&T part of the DAS; since we still can’t convince Verizon to provide similar statistics we’ll just have to guess what the total-totals are.

Stay tuned for more information about college stadium deployments… look for our Q4 STR report in early December!

YouTube Deal Will Enhance ACC’s Digital Network

The Atlantic Coast Conference’s digital network has introduced a channel on YouTube that will deliver live content from the ACC as YouTube continues to grow as a force in live sports broadcasting with deals such as this.

We have long talked about the emergence of YouTube as a de facto channel for sports, and YouTube has been working hard to cement that position with the ACC deal as one of its more notable deals. However in case you missed it will also be serving up some nice Olympic moments via a deal with NBC that will enable it to show highlights and live events from the London Olympics.

The ACC and YouTube have been partners to a degree for several years and provided exclusive, but not live content at its site since at least 2009, however this takes it a significant step further.

Between that time and now the ACC started a deal with Silver Chalice that enabled it to launch the ACC Digital Network that provided broad coverage of the ACC schools including news conferences, highlights and analysis that could be delivered to both Apple and Android mobile devices.

Now it will also present live events as well as on demand videos that are created by the ACC as well as a live weekly studio program during football and basketball season. There will also be condensed replays of ACC Network productions of football and basketball games.

The current deal will call for the ACC to provide fan access and interaction to its analysts via Google’s Google Hangout. Fans can view, comment upon and share the programming by visiting youtube.com/accdigitalnetwork, or by searching for ACC Digital Network on YouTube.

Of course others are also working on attracting digital partners. The Big Ten Networks recently expanded to support Android in its broadcast and the Pac-12 is increasingly involved in digital media. Still it is nice that the ACC will be presenting live sports to its fan base and other interested parties.

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